Internet of intelligent things and robot as a service

The development of computing and communication systems has gone through a spiral cycle of centralization and decentralization paradigms. The earliest computer systems are centralized mainframe computers. The paradigm moved to decentralized as networked stations became more dependable, extensible and cost-effective. The decentralized systems have their limitations and inconveniences. The virtualization and cloud computing paradigm creates a centralized system that appears to users to be a centralized system, where computing and communication resources are not in the client computers but in an integrated infrastructure that is accessible anywhere and anytime. Nevertheless, the implementation of the centralized infrastructure is equipped with decentralized and redundant resources, which makes the system more dependable as any component failures can be tolerated internally. The Internet of Things extends the cloud computing concept beyond computing and communication to include everything, particularly, the physical devices. This paper discusses the architectures, interfaces, and behaviors of intelligent devices connected to the cloud computing environment. Robot as a Service is the case study, which has all the key features of Internet of Intelligent Things: autonomous, mobile, sensing, and action taking. The goal is to further extend the centralized cloud computing environment into a decentralized system to complete another cycle of the spiral development. The idea of achieving the goal is through autonomous and intelligent mobile physical services or robots as services to form local pool of intelligent devices and that can make local decisions without communicate with the cloud. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.